Unabomber

Re "Professor Responds in Open Letter to Unabomber's Ideas," July 5: We must all be grateful to UC Berkeley psychology professor Tom R. Tyler's "carefully crafted open letter." I hope he referred the Unabomber to Reed Karaim's engaging article, "Technology and Its Discontents," in Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress, May/June 1995. By doing so the Unabomber would find he is neither alone nor unique in his concerns; he would also discover a host of the type Tyler describes as "intelligent, thoughtful, rational people," most of whom abhor what is happening to too many as a consequence of unthinkingly accepting any loss of "control and autonomy over their lives."

The FBI had its own notes on "dirty old man" Charles Bukowski. The writer was investigated by the agency as a civil servant with ties to the underground press -- and for being a self-described "dirty old man. " Recently National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollmann went public with his FBI surveillance, writing about his experiences of both being watched and reading the report. (At one point, as Vollmann writes in this month's Harpers , he was suspected of being the Unabomber.)

Re "One Fear Ends--and Hope Is Reaffirmed," Opinion, April 7: Martin E. Marty gave specious ties of Easter redemption to finding a likely Unabomber suspect. Marty's article contains no substantive knowledge of Ted Kaczynski. Further, it lacks insight on the redemptive prospect of finding the perpetrator. Instead, Marty plays childishly on math-phobia: "whose mad genius threatens us all. Still, the possibility that such an achiever in mathematics as Kaczynski could so disrupt life has to remain disturbing."

Literary fans know William T. Vollmann as a National Book Award-winning author; the FBI knew him as Unabomber suspect S-2047. In the September issue of Harper's , Vollmann explores his FBI file in a brilliant, chilling essay about America and privacy, keyed to the strange experience of discovering he was suspected of being the Unabomber. "I read his manifesto when it was published," Vollmann writes. "Angry, pitiless, certain of its righteousness, intelligent but fatally incapable of proportionality and discrimination, it made a repellent impression.

Literary fans know William T. Vollmann as a National Book Award-winning author; the FBI knew him as Unabomber suspect S-2047. In the September issue of Harper's , Vollmann explores his FBI file in a brilliant, chilling essay about America and privacy, keyed to the strange experience of discovering he was suspected of being the Unabomber. "I read his manifesto when it was published," Vollmann writes. "Angry, pitiless, certain of its righteousness, intelligent but fatally incapable of proportionality and discrimination, it made a repellent impression.

It seems that Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, couldn't pass up the opportunity to let his former classmates at Harvard College know just what he's up to these days. Associated Press reported that in an alumni directory, Kaczynski lists his occupation as "prisoner" and under awards lists "eight life sentences. " He is indeed serving a life sentence at the supermax prison in Florence, Colo., for killing three people during his bombing spree in which he mailed bombs to universities around the nation.

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig disaster sent a torrent of toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico, there was at least one person — sitting at the moment in a federal penitentiary in Colorado — briskly penning, "I told you so. " Failures of technology don't get much bigger than this, and Theodore Kaczynski, whose murderous, 17-year revolution against technology as the Unabomber got him sentenced to life in prison, couldn't...

June 30, 1995 | BETTINA BOXALL and RICH CONNELL and DAVID FERRELL, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Under tight security and a pervasive clamp of fear, Los Angeles International Airport continued to handle the early waves of the brisk summer travel season Thursday, even as a series of letters sent by the Unabomber raised a new specter of terrorism if the bomber is unable to gain a mass media forum for his anarchist views.

A long-awaited prison psychiatrist's report on Theodore Kaczynski was released Friday, detailing the Unabomber's fantasies about mutilating a girlfriend, killing psychiatrists and having a sex-change operation. The 47-page report, compiled in part from interviews with Kaczynski in his Sacramento County Jail cell and from his writings dating to the 1960s, said Kaczynski's frustrated desire for a sex-change operation set him on the path to being a serial killer.

We aren't the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. --From the Unabomber's manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future" **** Across 35,000 words he rumbled and he rambled and railed about science and new machines. When it was first published last September, the Unabomber's manifesto was almost unbearable to read. Not only was it long and boring, but its very publication seemed gratingly unfair. This was the work of a sneaky assassin.

It seems that Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, couldn't pass up the opportunity to let his former classmates at Harvard College know just what he's up to these days. Associated Press reported that in an alumni directory, Kaczynski lists his occupation as "prisoner" and under awards lists "eight life sentences. " He is indeed serving a life sentence at the supermax prison in Florence, Colo., for killing three people during his bombing spree in which he mailed bombs to universities around the nation.

May 9, 2012 | By Dean Kuipers, This post has been corrected, as indicated below.

With a simple statement on Tuesday, State Farm Insurance became the latest company to withdraw its support from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank which claims a “realist” position questioning that humans are responsible for climate change. “State Farm is ending its association with the Heartland Institute. This is because of a recent billboard campaign launched by the Institute,” said the entirety of the statement, which ran on the State Farm Facebook page.

Patrick Fischer, a retired computer science professor at Vanderbilt University whose secretary was injured when he was targeted by the Unabomber in 1982, has died. He was 75. Fischer died Aug. 26 in hospice care in Montgomery County, Md., the university announced. A cause was not given. He taught at Vanderbilt in Nashville from 1980 to 1998 and helped establish the computer science department, serving as chairman for 15 years. Fischer was an expert in informational systems for education institutions, computational complexity and interactive database systems, according to the university.

Anders Behring Breivik, the chief suspect in Friday's twin terrorist attacks in Norway, copied passages from infamous American Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski's manifesto and used them in his own writings, according to a Norwegian website that publishes political commentary, analysis and essays. Hans Rustad, editor of the website Document.no, writes that Breivik's 1,500-page political manifesto, titled "A European Declaration of Independence" and posted on the website (link in Norwegian)

Could the Unabomber and Chicago's Tylenol poisoner be one and the same? FBI agents investigating the Tylenol killings, unsolved for nearly 30 years, want Theodore Kaczynski's DNA, but they aren't saying whether there's any reason to believe he might be a match. The FBI confirmed Thursday that it wanted a new DNA sample from Kaczynski, an Illinois native who last week filed a handwritten motion seeking to halt a government auction of his belongings on the grounds they could help prove his innocence in the Tylenol case.

Dr. Charles Epstein, a UC San Francisco medical geneticist who studied Down syndrome and pioneered genetic counseling for families with affected children, but whose career was temporarily interrupted by a vicious 1993 attack by the notorious Unabomber, died Feb. 15 at his home in Tiburon, Calif. He was 77 and had been battling pancreatic cancer. Epstein helped create a model genetics clinic, the first on the West Coast, and "helped establish and legitimize the profession of genetic counseling," Joann Boughman of the American Society of Human Genetics said last year when Epstein received the group's major leadership award.

In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people . . . --From a manifesto attributed to the Unabomber. **** The body is received in a white plastic body pouch which has on the zipper a Sacramento County Coroner's Office Tag. . . . --Opening of an autopsy report filed in the death of Sacramento timber lobbyist Gilbert Murray, the last person to be killed by the serial bomber.

Giving in to the elusive Unabomber, the Washington Post and the New York Times agreed Monday to publish the deadly terrorist's 35,000-word manuscript in today's editions of the Post at the request of the nation's top law enforcement officials. Despite concerns that printing the manifesto might set a precedent for other would-be terrorists, the publishers acted just before a deadline set by the Unabomber, who had pledged not to kill again if one of the newspapers published his treatise in full.

January 11, 2011 | By Richard A. Serrano and David Savage, Washington Bureau

The judicial process for Jared Lee Loughner, accused in the Tucson shooting rampage, promises to be a long and potentially convoluted one involving both federal and state prosecutions. Loughner's federal defense team, led by high-profile capital-defense lawyer Judy Clarke, will probably examine whether he has any defense other than insanity, and whether an insanity defense alone could keep him off death row, legal experts said. Clarke, a former head of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers, is based in San Diego, and has represented Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who pleaded guilty by reason of insanity, and Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph.

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig disaster sent a torrent of toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico, there was at least one person — sitting at the moment in a federal penitentiary in Colorado — briskly penning, "I told you so. " Failures of technology don't get much bigger than this, and Theodore Kaczynski, whose murderous, 17-year revolution against technology as the Unabomber got him sentenced to life in prison, couldn't...